Thread by @Jarushub

1/ One evening in 2003, in my 2nd year in Ife, I was taking yr 1 students SSC 106 (Mathematics for Social Scientists II) tutorial at the Awo mosque area. One boy, who had come to pray, stopped briefly at the tutorial class (organised by MSSN), and walked away after about 1 minute

2/ One of the students in class whispered to me “that boy that just left is the best student in our class, he had 5 points (5/5) last semester”.

I am a sucker for academic excellence so I took notice of him.

3/Our paths crossed few days later and it didn’t take more than few mins of interactions with him to know his worth. One of the most difficult things to do is to admit your junior is more brilliant than you. Razaq must be the first junior I ever conceded that to right from school

4/ I became one of his advisers, sometimes offering him tips to dealing with some courses as one that did the courses a year before him. By my yr 4 and his own year 3, I had become the president of OAU SIFE (now Enactus) an American free market advocating student projects group.

5/ I co-opted him into SIFE and he happened to be one of our biggest assets, usually coming with the best ideas, and later succeeding me as president upon my graduation, and leading the team to 2nd place in SIFE global competition in New York in 2007.

6/ Razaq, nicknamed Ebora (The Wizard) by his classmates, would later finish with first class in Ife and snapped up by Shell, after working for a number of medium capital markets operators in Lagos. He is also of the few people that aced all CFA levels at first attempt.

7/ He quit Shell to go into entrepreneurship at some point.

He is now the CEO and co-founder of Cowrywise, the fintech startup with backing by American investors.

8/ His life story is actually very interesting. Born and bred in Kano, though from Oyo state, as late as in secondary school in Kano all he wanted to become was a generator mechanic because his most financially stable uncle was a mechanic.

9/ An ethno-religious riot in Kano and his family relocated to the south, then he gained admission into Ife. And the exposure there changed his mentality and dream. His story in full in this Nairametric article nairametrics.com/2020/11/01/how…

10/ Please stand up for recognition @razaqahmed1

From the horse's mouth, Razaq tells the story of how he escaped the Kano crisis of 1999